The climate is always changing

The climate is always changing

MADAM - In response to county councillor Sarah Lunnon (Green, Stroud Central) writing in the SNJ of February 26.

The catastrophe of climate misunderstanding and misinformation

I don’t know who has been denying climate or debating whether climate change exists.

If climate had never changed, the world would still be in say the Jurassic period maybe.

If climate didn’t vary from one place to another sun seekers would not likely prefer southern Spain to the north of Scotland for their sun bathing holidays.

The real scientific debate is of course about what influences may cause the climate to change, by how much in terms of temperatures, how long change may take and what effects, if significant, we are likely to experience as a result.

Currently there has been no statistically significant global warming for around 17 years (depending on which dataset is used).

From the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, there was a well-documented period of modest warming preceded by a mild cooling period from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s.

There has been the resultant average minor global temperature increase since the Little Ice Age (ref Prof John Christy).

One has to ask how there were so many storms and floods going back to the nineteenth century and before.

No one had even thought of blaming humankind for the weather then although the alarmists of the day did blame so called witches for ‘cooking’ the weather?

Weather (rain) not climate change has been the cause of floods which have been exacerbated by the European Union’s discouraging dredging of waterways in the name of creating wetland wildlife habitats.

Whist we all love wildlife, our people living on flood plains should not be the scapegoats of misguided EU wildlife policy.

Pseudo-science misinformation on the jet stream should be treated with extreme caution.

IPCC AR5 is now clear that collapse of the Gulf Stream is very unlikely. Directional variability of the various weather systems is nothing new.

To read ‘climate’ alarmist accounts, one could be forgiven for thinking that the UK never experienced frequent heavy rainfall or storms in the past.

Precedents are well documented in the historical record.

I have to agree that the government needs to be changed for a more realistic United Kingdom Independence Party government but scapegoating the environment minister is not the answer.

Thank goodness there are a few climate rationalists left in the Coalition to try to defend our way of life against the rest of the LibLabCon.

The real problem is in the Department of Energy (& climate change) where their obsession with intermittent renewable energy is costing us dearly on our energy bills for wind and solar (photovoltaic) subsidy farming.

One thing we really do NOT need with changeable weather of any kind is for the energy we rely on to recover from adverse weather events and maintain our well-being during them to be expensive and weather-dependent itself.

Caroline Stephens

United Kingdom Independence Party prospective parliamentary candidate for Stroud

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